FTPeek

[eagles1]

I have a situation and like to see whether FTPeek can help to solve. We are doing retail business and have stores all over the town. All retail stores are using Filemaker to do the Point-Of-Sales functions locally. At the end of the day, I want each store to FTP the daily sales summary ( a small FM file) to the main office FTP Server. I think this can be handled easily by FTPeek.

My challenge is at the main office. I want to develop a FM Server script that will schedule to download all the uploaded file and update the main FM database for consolidation. Similarly, if there are any changes I want to make to the store's Filemaker, I will upload the changes( FM file) to a FTP server. Then each store will run a script to download and update the FM locally. Can this be done using FTPeek ?

Thank you

[bcooney]

I'll let Jesse address the use of FTPeek for this, but what you are describing is synchronizing multiple FM databases. This is the realm of WorldSync's Syncdek. .

[eagles1]

Thank you Bcooney for your post. I am aware of the product from WorldSync. It is a good product. I only need to upload, download and update a small piece of the entire database, I do not need the complexity and the cost of using WorldSync.

Furthermore, I need to do this only once a day, either at the start or end of the day. No real urgency in having data synchronized up to the minutes.

I like simplicity and FTPeek looks simple enough to implement and maintain.

[Søren Dyhr]

Is it down to military spec.'s the solution requires sync'ing in the first place?

At the end of the day, I want each store to FTP the daily sales summary ( a small FM file) to the main office FTP Server.

To me does this seem a bit de-normalized, why isn't something like this established:

http://www.kevinfrank.com/download/2009/shadow-reporting.zip

Ideally should only one single transaction table exist at all no matter how many shops we're talking about, but speed could be an issue so this table in particular would need to be a SQL one!

http://fmdl.filemaker.com/MISC/fmp9/mysql_ver_4_081307.mov

--sd

[Smef]

You can use FTPeek to upload and download files through FTP, but it does not have any functionality for updating or merging FileMaker databases.

You can download a demo of FTPeek from:

http://360works.com/ftp-plugin/

When you are ready to purchase, please keep in mind that you will need an enterprise license if you wish to use FTPeek with server-side-scripting to upload and download files.

Edited September 4, 2009 by Guest

[eagles1]

I am back to this after having been away for sometime.

I certainly appreciate very much the solution suggested by Soren. I certainly agreed there should be only on transaction.

Unfortunately , the internet access in my country (one little country in South East Asia) is extremely unreliable and slow. It is close to impossible to do any form of online operation from our shop to the main office. That is why I am exploring the option of using file upload. At least I think this is a much safer option.

Thank you very much